In the past, the United States had coped with population pressures through expansion. Driven by the same racial imperatives as their ancient Aryan forebears and contemporary adventurers in Africa, white Americans had moved ever westward, “preferring the conquest of inferior peoples to the more difficult problem of a permanent agriculture.”212 But now there was no more proximate land to be had. “We have been great pioneers,” pronounced Davenport, “but our pilgrimage is over . . . We cannot as before move on.”213 The Europeans might be fighting for Africa, but “for us there are no more ‘new worlds.’”214 True, a few “wanderers” had gone to Hawai‘i and the Philippines, but these islands could hold only a fringe. “We are done with moving,” wrote Davenport. “It is here we rest. It is here if anywhere that we shall work out our racial destiny and that future will depend in the last analysis upon our food supply.”215
With no more moves on the horizon, would Illinois follow the path of once great civilizations like Carthage, Egypt, Palestine, Babylon, India, and China, all of which had failed to feed their people?216 Davenport thought not, due to scientific agriculture. In the short term, sharing information with market value might nick at the competitive advantages earned through scientific breakthroughs. But in the longer run, an alliance of agriculturalists would forestall the horror of an all-out race war. And if, despite the best efforts to avoid it, that race war ever came, the scientific agriculturalists who heeded Davenport’s words could hope that their web of contacts and exchanges would at least place American farmers and their northern European associates together on the well-fed winning side.
AMERICAN EMPIRE
Their transimperial alliance building does not mean that people such as Davenport had no particular commitments to American power. To the contrary, Davenport construed agricultural alliances as a means to advance American empire. Born in a log cabin in Michigan in 1856, this son of settler colonists graduated from the Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University). After several years working the family farm alongside his father, he returned to his alma mater as a professor.217
Davenport’s life took an unexpected turn in 1891, when Louis Queroz came to Michigan from Brazil in search of a man to establish an agricultural college in Piracicaba (in the state of São Paulo). Relying on his English-speaking wife as his translator, Queroz beseeched Davenport to found a “Leetle Lansing” in his country. Davenport demurred. Queroz offered Davenport $6,000, three times his current salary. That did it. Davenport said he would go for a year, even though Michigan said there would be no job waiting for him upon his return.218
Eugene Davenport and his wife, Emma, found Brazil to be a land of wonders. “It was a land of coffee, cotton, cane and cattle,” reported Eugene. He characterized most of the laborers as “negroes.” The farmers fattened their hogs on sugarcane; they butchered their cattle in the cooler hours of the evening, knowing that whatever beef had not been sold by six the next morning would have to be destroyed. The people subsisted largely on black beans and rice. Distanced from most of their neighbors by gulfs of race, class, and language, the Davenports socialized with elites such as the Querozes, with fellow U.S. citizens, and with expatriates from Ireland, Spain, and Germany. They returned from their outings to a house full of chickens, kept inside to combat roaches.219
With the help of his interpreters—the first a Dane, the second from Switzerland—Davenport set to work. His initial task was to build a house for the presidente of the college and to design the campus. The larger goal was more daunting: to spread the principles of scientific agriculture. The surrounding political context made his later institution-building struggles in Illinois seem like a cinch. “Revolution was the order of the day,” recalled Davenport after the fact. In subsequent letters to colleagues in England, Davenport also complained about the “indolence of the people”: their mental makeup, refusal to learn, and lack of honesty and moral perception.220 When the promised funding from the state of São Paulo did not materialize, the Davenports packed their bags.
Rather than return to the United States straightaway, they traveled first to England. There they visited the famous agricultural station at Rothamsted. They arrived at a moment of great excitement—the researchers there had just solved the mystery of fixing nitrogen in the soil. Just as exciting for the Davenports was the warm welcome they received. They were thrilled to see the inside workings of the oldest agricultural station in the world and to talk farming with its leading figures.221
If Davenport had been a source of scientific knowledge in Brazil, his time in England reminded him that he was still on the periphery of scientific agriculture circuits. Following his arrival in Illinois, he wrote deferential letters to his esteemed Rothamsted contacts, thanking them again for their kindnesses and telling them that his students were studying their experiments closely, regarding them as a model. When his students ventured “a little publication,” he solicited a few lines of encouragement to be included therein.222 But even as Davenport played the part of a postcolonial supplicant, he set to work building an empire of his own.
As dean of the College of Agriculture, Davenport attracted students from fifteen countries to come to Illinois to study. A 1909 report mentioned agriculture students from China, Japan, India, Norway, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines.223 These students tended to come from privileged backgrounds, as seen in the example of George M. Yankovsky, of Vladivostok, Eastern Siberia. Yankovsky wanted to learn “improved methods of farming” to increase production on his family’s land—amounting to 21,800 acres—bordering the Japan Sea. Given that Vladivostok had been founded as a far outpost of the Russian Empire only in 1860, Yankovsky struggled with the same issues as the settler colonists of Illinois— how to establish profitable commodity production on newly acquired land.224
Davenport praised these recruits for bringing to the university “a rich variety of agricultural practices from other parts of the country and the world.”225 In making such claims, he may have had a student like Camili R. Lopez in mind. Born and raised in Mexico, Lopez had studied two years in Spain, two years in Alabama, and one year at Notre Dame before coming to the University of Illinois to complete his undergraduate work. True to Davenport’s claims, Lopez brought agricultural expertise to Illinois, which he shared in an article on coffee growing that he published as a student.226
Local business leaders agreed with Davenport’s claims that foreign students could serve as a resource. The Chamber of Commerce invited students from Chile, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Cuba, Canada, China, India, Turkey, and several European countries to speak on ways to reach prospective customers in those lands.227 In addition to speaking about markets, the students provided tips on investment opportunities. In 1920, J. J. Mirasol, a graduate student in agronomy from the Philippines, spoke of the small proportion of the land under cultivation and the opportunities that afforded.228
Yet despite claims that foreign students should be regarded as resources, they had come as students, not teachers. They did not hail from places known to be at the forefront of scientific agriculture. Whereas the faculty in the College of Agriculture turned to Europe for the latest lab equipment, it imported “old agriculture implements” from Mexico for “museum specimens.”229 In a reference letter for S. Sinha, who had come to Illinois to study agriculture “as it can be applied to the development of his native country,” his faculty adviser made no mention of the knowledge he had brought with him. Instead, he commented on Sinha’s earnestness, energy, and industry. The herbarium specimens, bulletins, and lantern views that Sinha would bring to his new post had all been collected in Illinois.230
Davenport’s efforts to educate students such as Mirasol and Sinha fit with the larger politics of colonial uplift through agricultural education. Dean C. Worcester captured some of these politics in his 1914 account of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. This book, which drew on Worcester’s extensive experience as the secretary of the in
terior of the Philippine Islands and member of the Philippine Commission, featured a photograph of a cornfield as the frontispiece. In front of the corn, next to a U.S. educational official, stood the vanquished revolutionary leader turned U.S. collaborator General Emilio Aguinaldo. The caption described the corn as having been raised by Emilio Aguinaldo, Jr., for a school contest. According to the caption, the scene typified “the peace, prosperity, and enlightenment which have been brought about in the Philippine Islands under American rule.”231
The Illinois Agriculturist, published by the Agricultural Club of the university, celebrated the college’s role in imperial uplift in a piece on Antonio Bautista, an agronomy student in the class of 1906. In the interview, Bautista played the part of the appreciative colonial subject: “the outlook for agriculture in the Philippines seems dependent upon the efforts of the United States government, which is doing its best to make the people understand some of the more important principles of crop production.” In reviewing the importance of agriculture for colonial incorporation, Bautista did not condemn U.S. efforts, but he did not really praise them either. “By the establishment of experiment stations, the founding of schools of agriculture in different parts of the Archipelago, the introduction of seeds of plants from the temperate zone, and the survey of soils, the resources of the islands are becoming known.” Known to whom, he did not say. But he did say who would benefit: agricultural development would make the islands “a most valuable addition” to the United States.232
Dean Conant Worcester, the secretary of the interior of the U.S.-occupied Philippine Islands, began his account of the Philippines with this photograph of the defeated nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo alongside the U.S. colonial official in charge of education. This field of cultivated corn—grown by Aguinaldo’s son for a school contest —signaled the important role of scientific agriculture in the U.S. program of “benevolent uplift.”
Dean C. Worcester, The Philippines Past and Present, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1914), frontispiece.
Near the end of his career, Davenport recalled some of the international students he had taught, starting with three “high class Hindu” students in agriculture: Rathindranath Tagore, Nagrendanath Gangulee, and Santosh Chandra Majumdar. Then there was Saleem Raji Farah, a Nazareth Palestinian. “An Arabian but a fine student. We exchange cards every Christmas.” The recollections go on: Diego Aguilar Sevilla, “A Philippino who after doing excellent work with us at Illinois was found to be a leper.” Yoshifusa Iida, “Japanese, now in Imperial College of Agriculture in Tokyo.” George John Bouyoucos, “Greek student specializing in soils.”233
With the exception of Bouyoucos, from the bankrupt nation of Greece, these were not European students. With the exception of Iida, they hailed from the imperial periphery. Their decision to study scientific agriculture in Illinois put Davenport in an imperial center. Having adopted the structures of scientific agriculture from the European powers, his agricultural college could elevate its own position by propagating those structures elsewhere—including in Europe. Davenport’s greatest coup came with Don Demetrius Andronescu, minister of agriculture in Romania. He came to Illinois with a government commission to study corn. According to Davenport, the minister was humbled by what he saw: “In my country I am Professeur. Here (holding his head down) I am estudiente; I am as nothing.”234
Davenport gloried in the humbled professeur’s decision to stay and take a doctorate in Illinois, for it seemed to prove that Illinois had moved to the center of a wide set of relationships from what had once been the western edge. The teacher-student nature of these relationships encapsulated Davenport’s ambitions for leadership in the expansive world of scientific agriculture. As these reminiscences show, Davenport was more empire builder at heart than isolationist. He dreamt not only of bombarding the world with Illinois corn but also of transforming the world along Illinois lines. Rather than fencing his cornfields off from the world, he aimed to make his college a seedbed for a new strain of empire.
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
In hoping to make Illinois an imperial center, Davenport had a lot in common with his congressman. Along with crisscrossing the Atlantic, McKinley circled the globe three times and went on several Caribbean cruises.235 He traveled for pleasure, for business, and to gather information that would help him make policy. Crowds numbering in the hundreds turned out to hear him speak when he returned.236
Congressman William B. McKinley of Illinois (not to be confused with President William McKinley) en route to the Philippines with a congressional party conducted by Secretary of War William Howard Taft. McKinley is seated third from the right in the second row. First daughter Alice Roosevelt is seated fourth from the left in the front row and Taft stands directly behind her.
“The Secretary Taft Party Aboard the Manchuria,” The Urbana Courier, Oct. 3, 1905.
In 1905, McKinley sailed to the Philippines as the guest of the secretary of war, in a party that included other members of Congress and first daughter Alice Roosevelt. Based on the party’s sightseeing trips, McKinley considered himself an expert on the islands. Speaking at the First M. E. Church in Urbana, he reported that the soil of the Philippines was fertile, but graft was rampant and “the farmer pays the freight.” Disregarding the Filipino independence efforts that had led to a full-blown war against the United States from 1899 to 1902 and a guerrilla war thereafter, McKinley praised U.S. efforts “to educate the people, so that they will know their rights and will have the ability to assert them.” Comparing the Filipinos to children, he commended the U.S. regime’s efforts to “instill into them some ambition to work and to save.”237
The Urbana Courier, which praised McKinley’s portrayal of the islands for its faithfulness and accuracy, wrote that “Mr. McKinley showed that there is no standard of right among the people he visited, for they conscientiously do things which would shock our conception of at least the proprieties.” McKinley’s claims that “American civilization must act as a lever to raise them to a higher and nobler plane of living” seemed indisputable. To top things off, the congressman known as an advocate of peace told his audience that since many tribes in the Philippines were “far from conquered,” a “tremendous work” lay ahead for the American people. After an hour and thirty-five minutes, he stopped, but according to the Courier, his audience, so “glad that their lots have been cast in this God-blessed land,” was “anxious to hear more.”238
Two years later, the newspapers covered another trip, a monthlong cruise around the Caribbean with the Speaker of the House, Joseph Cannon. On this expedition, the party stopped in Venezuela and “all the important points in the West Indies,” including Puerto Rico. The group also spent a few days looking over the work on the Panama Canal, “and all seemed pleased with what they saw there.”239
Just as scientific agricultural alliances did not quite extend to colonial plantation laborers, the principles of the Inter-Parliamentary Union seemed less universal from a Caribbean cruise. Just as for Davenport, McKinley’s solidarities with Europe undergirded hierarchies elsewhere. The more he hobnobbed with parliamentarians from European empires, the greater his own will to rule. His two sets of commitments—to interparliamentary cooperation and U.S. expansion in the Caribbean and Pacific—were not as oppositional as they might seem. As with the scientific agriculturalists in his district, the former helped prep the ground for the latter.
ANTICOLONIAL STRUGGLES
Not everybody in Champaign County shared these northward-skewing alliance politics and southward-skewing imperialist impulses. Important veins of dissent can be found in the county’s sanctum of scientific agriculture, the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois. Yet even these countervailing currents do not give credence to the isolationist legend. To the contrary, they reveal a different kind of alliance politics sprouting among the grass roots, planted by foreign students such as Rathindranath Tagore.
Bor
n into a landed family in British-ruled Bengal, Tagore was educated by an English tutor who had a bungalow in his family’s compound.240 Believing that a technical education would enable him to benefit his people as well as himself, Tagore set forth from Bengal in 1906 at age eighteen to study agriculture in the United States. After chugging from port to port along the Malay coast and China, the ship docked in Japan in the midst of the celebrations for the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Being “fresh from the political battleground of the Swadeshi movement” (a movement to oppose British rule through the use of Indian-made goods), Tagore and the other students in his party joined in the celebrations. “We looked upon every Japanese as a hero,” Tagore later recalled, for the Japanese had killed the specter of the “foreign devil” in the Orient. The Japanese they encountered treated them in turn with respect, offering up their tram seats when they realized that the travelers had come from the land of Buddha’s birth.241
Denied passage on a ship to California, ostensibly due to an eye disease, Tagore sought advice from a Japanese specialist. The doctor laughed aloud, telling Tagore that he did not have an eye problem, he had a mathematics problem—anti-Asian quotas. The doctor had a mathematical prescription, premised on the realization that U.S. officials could not tell one Indian from another, especially when charged with evaluating so many. He counseled Tagore to return day after day until the odds came up in his favor and he was included in the 10 percent quota. Tagore followed his advice and was approved on his third try.242
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